Pussy Riot- the voice of the band members

Mon 20th Aug 2012

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

In fact this trial is not about three singers in the group Pussy Riot. If that had been the case, then what´s going on here would have been without meaning. This is a trial about the whole of the political system in the Russian federation. The imitation of a legal process is closing in on its predestined conclusion – that is what our investigations officers, judges and prosecutors are. And also the ones that [are] above them: the ones that submitted the political order for repressive action. Who is to blame for the performance in the Christ Saviour Cathedral and the following process after the concert? The guilty one is the authoritarian political system. What the group Pussy Riot do is oppositional art or politics in the form of art. In any case, it is about a form of civic actions under circumstances where the state system suppresses basic human rights.

We are more free than the people sitting opposite us on the prosecuting side, since we are able to say whatever we want, while the ones opposite us only says what is allowed by the political censorship. We can´t utter words like ”punk mass” or ‘‘Mother of God, expel Putin!” Maybe they think it would be good just to hand us a prison sentence also because we stand up against Putin and his system…unfortunately they are just puppets here I hope they understand this and choose the path of freedom, truth and honesty...

And finally I would like to cite the Pussy Riot song: “…Open all doors, lose your epaulets, feel the scent of freedom together with us”

Yekaterina Samutsevitch

I have mixed emotions about this process: on the one hand we expect a guilty verdict. In comparison with the court machinery we are nothing, we have lost. On the other hand we have won, since the prosecution against us is forged, and the system can´t hide the repressive nature of the process. Once again Russia is viewed in the eyes of the world society in a different way than how Vladimir Putin tries to paint the country during his daily international meetings. All the measures he has promised to implement in order to develop a constitutional state have obviously not been taken. And his statement that the verdict in our trial will be nonbiased and fair is another attempt to deceive the country and the world society.

Maria Alyokhina

After almost six months in jail I have realised that the prison is a Russia ‘in miniature’. One can start with the governance – it is the same sort of vertical power. To [take a decision] in any issue at all is only possible through direct involvement of the boss, any horizontal delegation of responsibilities is missing, a division that would radically ease everybody’s life. Individual initiative is missing, informing and mutual suspicion florishes.
In the jail, as in the whole of our country, everything is aimed to de-personify the human, to transform her to a function, regardless if it is the function of the employee or the function of the prisoner. Very quickly one gets used to the monotonous and senseless regime. It resembles the regime [into which] people are placed by birth. In such circumstances trivialities becomes important to people. In the jail it can be about a table cloth or a plastic plate that meets with the personal approval of the governor. Outside of the prison it is instead a position of high status in society.

I get extremely agitated by the wording ”so-called” in the state prosecutor’s speech regarding modern art. I want to point out that similar wording was used during the process against the poet Brodskij. His poems where called “so-called” poems, and the witnesses hadn´t read them. In the same manner, our witnesses hadn´t themselves seen the events in our case.

[Our apologies were] also labelled ”so-called” in the collective prosecutor head. And this is an insult since we honestly have apologised. You still haven´t understood, or you pretend, when you talk about false apologies. I don´t understand what more you need to hear.

And thus this trial to me is a so-called ”trial” And I am not afraid of you. I´m not afraid of you, not of the lies and fantasies, the lousy decorated falseness in the verdict from this so-called ”court” For you can only take the so-called “freedom” from me. That´s the only sort that exists in the Russian federation. But no-one can take my freedom away from me. It lives in the world, it will live on due to publicity. It is honesty and sincerity, it is the [quest] of truth that makes us all more free. That will be shown.

With thanks to Anthony Binder and the Pussy Riot support group in Stockholm